Keeping information always available at your fingertips, UpShot.com provides a perfect balance of ease of use and power. In fact, UpShot.com is hindered only by weak lead tracking and Web integration. Still, this service is a great solution for small and medium-sized sales teams.

For medium-to-large businesses serious about migrating a sales force automation system to the Web quickly and affordably, Up-Shot.com ESP is an ideal solu-tion. This higher-cost plan in-cludes 24-hour customer ser-vice, administrator training, monthly CD-based backups, a guarantee of 99.9 percent up-time, and deployment within 15 days regardless of the size of the system you're transferring.
The impressive Web-based in-terface almost makes you forget you're working in a browser. UpShot.com conserves screen space and lets you access many features from a single button or menu.

Information on each Account, Contact, and Deal screen is or-ganized into categories showing summaries of each item. Click on a toggle button next to an item and the details appear in a small overlay window. This lets you drill down to details without having to reload each page.

UpShot.com uses some clever tools for real-time reporting. Like Agillion's Dashboard, the What's Up screen shows new ac-tivity for sales, leads, and deals. When you view Events for a contact or account, Up-Shot.com displays a dynamic histogram of the events. To see the details and dates for each event, simply place your mouse over a point on the histogram.

A Monitor Web Page feature tracks specific URLs for changes or keywords. When items change, UpShot.com alerts you. This is useful for checking prospect Web sites for specific activity that might give you a leg-up on a sale.

Users can import account, con-tact, deal, and event data us-ing the Import wizard. You es-tablish table relationships simply by mapping the same source field (Account Name) to both the Account and Contact tables. You can also sync with Microsoft Outlook and Palm de-vices.

Database expandability rivals that of the software-based products such as GoldMine 5.0 and Maximizer Enterprise 2000. You can add fields of almost any type, and using the Arrange Fields option, you can deter-mine on which screen and where on the screen new fields dis-play. You can get maps and di-rections for each account, but Web-based integration stops there unless you go to the Add-On Center to access third-party services for services like fax-ing and conferencing.

Various tools will sort, group, and find the information you need. You can conduct mul-tifield searches of accounts, contacts, deals, and tasks, though you can't search through notes or history fields as you can with GoldMine. The powerful Profile feature lets you save and reuse filters and place new records in profiles automati-cally based on criteria. This can be used throughout the ser-vice, even for impromptu e-mail distributions.

UpShot.com's focus on team sales shines through in both the comprehensive administra-tion tools and the shared ac-cess features. Roles determine whether users can create, edit, delete, or view within a par-ticular feature. And Territo-ries limit access based on the territory that an account be-longs to.

Like salesforce.com, Up-Shot.com lets you add appoint-ments for yourself or anyone on your team and see other users' calendars. But you can't over-lay multiple calendars, nor can you search for other users' free time. You can assign tasks to other members of your team and track assigned tasks sepa-rately.

UpShot.com's sales analysis tools focus on deals, which can have their own tasks, events, and appointments. Basic lead tracking involves categorizing deals as "leads" and running reports against deals in this stage. Built-in reports such as average days to close a deal, stage-to-stage analysis, and deal fallout give you real in-sight regarding the effective-ness of your sales strategies.
The powerful Radar tool pro-vides a dynamic view of deals in the pipeline. Resembling a radar screen, it indicates each deal's dollar value, probabil-ity of closing, and current sales stage. You can mouse over a deal's "blip" on the radar screen to expose details or click to jump to that deal. More dynamic than ACT! 2000's Sales Funnel or GoldMine's Pipeline Funnel, Radar is a unique way for sales managers to keep a handle on the pipe-line.

Other reports range from basic contact reports to analytical reports. And you can create more reports using the Info to Go option, where you pick fields or choose sort criteria to export to Microsoft Excel or plain-text format.

Integration with Microsoft Word is excellent, thanks to the Communicate plug-in, which lets you select a saved Pro-file, modify it, and create a mail-merge, an e-mail distribu-tion, labels, or envelopes. For a mail-merge, UpShot.com launches Word, connects to the data in the selected Profile, and lets you pick from the available merge fields. E-mail distributions are just as easy, and each recipient gets an in-dividually addressed e-mail.

UpShot.com is robust and has an enjoyable interface. Medium-size and large businesses will appreciate UpShot.com's ESP op-tion for its service and de-ployment guarantee, and small sales teams will enjoy the mix of ease and power that the standard service offers.GA